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00:00:01
AI Has Changed the Way I Design Logos - Here's The Process
138 Plays1 year ago
In this episode of the AI-Driven Marketer, Dan Sanchez talks about the transformative power of AI in graphic design, sharing his journey from being a "B-minus" designer to utilizing AI tools to upscale his skills. With first-hand experience, Dan demonstrates how AI, particularly with tools like mid-journey, can drastically enhance a marketer's ability to quickly conceive high-quality design concepts, as he walks us through the creation of a logo project for Keys Chiropractic. Discover Dan's insights on the synergy of AI with existing design savvy and how this combination can elevate the creative process for marketers everywhere. Tune in to unlock the potential of AI in your branding and design efforts.
Timestamps:
00:00 AI helps improve design skills, aiding speed.
03:35 Logo influenced by pine tree and badges.
06:44 Turning raster images into vector graphics in Illustrator.
10:16 Master design skills for faster, better results.
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Transcript
AI Enhances Job Roles
00:00:05
Speaker
Welcome back to the AI-driven marketer, Dan Sanchez here. And I want to talk a little bit about how AI's not replacing jobs right now, but is upskilling them pretty dramatically.
Empowering Graphic Designers with AI
00:00:17
Speaker
And today I want to talk about me as a graphic designer. I actually started my career as a designer. And even if you do not have a design background, this topic will still be relevant to you because I find that marketers often have to
00:00:29
Speaker
address design or give art direction to designers and work a lot with graphic designers. So oftentimes you have to fiddle with this stuff whether you have a background in it or not. The cool thing about AI is that it's helping marketers and designers level up their skill. If you were a 2 out of 10 on the graphic design skill level, AI is going to help you become
Improving Design Quality with Mid-Journey
00:00:50
Speaker
a 4.
00:00:50
Speaker
which is still really isn't that good but gosh dang it it's a lot better than you were before it's double you know I consider myself like a B- designer I'm better than someone coming out of community college but I clearly like I'm not an A plus designer I left design a long time ago and I kind of plateaued as far as how good my design can be but I find with AI tools
00:01:10
Speaker
I think I'm hitting A minus some of the times, you know, my A plus, but it's still pretty good. And I want to show you a design identity I made recently using AI and a couple of different AI tools, but specifically Mid-Journey in order to quickly concept ideas and get it done faster than I would have ever been able to. And I also not only got work done faster, but at a higher quality than I've ever been able to do before on a logo design. So let's take a look.
00:01:39
Speaker
This is also going to be, I mean, we're talking about graphic design, so it's gonna be a little bit more visual. If you're on Apple Podcast, just open up the app and you'll be able to follow along, because Apple supports video, who knew?
Visual Content Advisory
00:01:50
Speaker
If you're on, you can go watch it on YouTube, you can go find it on aidrivenmarketer.com, all the places where you can watch this video. But if you're listening along, I'll try my best to describe it along the way.
Creating a Vintage Inspired Logo with AI
00:02:02
Speaker
Otherwise, this is, it's gonna be a little bit more of a visually intense podcast, so you might wanna,
00:02:05
Speaker
skip to the next one, and save this one for later to watch, or just open it up on your phone. So let's dive into it. My friend is a chiropractor here in Chapel Hill, Tennessee, and opened up a new office, needed a new logo, and I just decided, hey, let's trade services, you do some chiropractic work for my family, I'll design you a logo, and I'm doing a little bit of marketing work and a website for Keys Chiropractic here in Chapel Hill. You can see, I'm gonna open up the screen here, he has a visual,
00:02:34
Speaker
like his visual design for his office is is very like i don't know how to describe it it's like a nash it's like almost like national park like woodsy he's got like lots of wood pat wood texture some like metal going on here
00:02:49
Speaker
lots of national park vintage posters and even like the little trinkets and things that he sells has this like vintage park look, where his wife Susan has designed a lot of cool little stickers and patches and different things. So I was like, huh, I like this aesthetic. And most chiropractor logos, like they look like this like abstract spine thing. It's like, they all look like that.
00:03:09
Speaker
And that's what his former logo looked like. So it's like, let's go with this theme. This is cool. People in this community really dig the outdoors. I think it'll work. So we concepted some ideas and kind of wanted to go around this like national park vintage badge looking thing. You know, like the patches. If you go into any national park store, you're going to find some patches.
Exploring Adventure Badge Designs
00:03:28
Speaker
You've probably seen the Yosemite logo. Things looking like that, but like in a brightly colored
00:03:33
Speaker
cool way like something you'd want to throw in your water bottle you know it's that kind of a kind of a feel badge sticker something you'd sew on a jacket or a backpack or something like that we've all seen these they're really nice looking and i'm like let's make a logo that's kind of reminisce of that and let's focus on a pine tree because pine trees are like run really straight and things you know chiropractors are dealing with the spine so that was kind of like the design thinking around it while you can go way more intense to do way more research on a logo i mean
00:03:59
Speaker
I mean, it's just not necessary here because it's a local chiropractor. It doesn't have to be optimized for like a national, international audience where you're going to have all these different perspectives on it, right? We're trying to create something memorable, fun that reinforces what they already have going on here. So we went to Mid-Journey and I actually just did this with them side by side. Oh, here it is.
00:04:25
Speaker
and just started asking. I said, I started entering prompts like a collection of adventure badges that depicts different symbols in a style of plein air landscapes. Light beige, orange, bold patterns, typography, palette knife work. I don't know, I was just, I think this one made its own prompt for this. What's kind of cool about these prompts
00:04:46
Speaker
is you can actually upload a picture of what you want for a logo. Maybe you have some inspiration. You can actually upload it and then say describe. You can actually go here and make a prompt that says describe in mid-journey and upload an image. And you can upload the image and it will literally describe it in four different ways. And you can just click like, hey, okay, now that you've described it, make it. And it goes and makes it. And that's kind of what I did here. Let's see if I can close down this prompt here so we can actually see.
00:05:13
Speaker
So that's what I did with these images. You can see I started with some fun color palettes here and some badges, and then it went through and made a whole bunch of logos. Look at the variety of work here. Look how many different options we were looking at. And of course, sometimes it's off. It's making tree paintings here.
00:05:31
Speaker
But you can see it's getting closer and as you start honing in the prompt, you get a little farther, a little closer. You can see I'm just going to quickly scroll through here as we're looking at like dozens and dozens
Refining Logo Concepts
00:05:41
Speaker
of options. You can see I started getting, I'm like, oh, this is looking sticker-ish. Maybe you need a more, needs to be more of a logo. You kind of go back and forth on these prompts for a while, but it honestly just doesn't take that long. You're probably talking about 30 minutes of like trying and tinkering with the prompts to get closer and closer to closer to what you want here.
00:05:58
Speaker
Right, so at the end of the day, I ended up picking a few, and we kind of narrowed it down to these options. I had about five. And this is the point where it's like, to get to just even five concepts, like five good concepts that you can work off of from here, takes a long time. This is where a lot of the design work goes into defining a couple of solid options.
00:06:20
Speaker
So you can see I have five, they all have the pine tree in the middle. Some are more colorful, some are more muted. They all have a little bit of a different design aesthetic, but they're all kind of in this like national park badge feel with like that vintage park badge logo looking thing.
00:06:36
Speaker
It's like, okay, Dan, but how did you get it to the next level? The next step we took is actually going from here and bringing it into Illustrator. You can see these were the two that they looked the closest at, and they're like, okay, we like these two. Can you mash them together? We like that this one has the pine tree in the middle and kind of a grouping of pine trees on the outside, but we like the color scheme of this one.
00:06:57
Speaker
and made this one. The only thing Mid-Journey gives you on these logos is a raster image, which is a problem.
Converting to Vector Graphics
00:07:06
Speaker
The cool thing is, if you ask it to be fairly flat in Discord or in Mid-Journey, it'll be a flattened, but it'll be a fairly flat design without gradients and stuff, and you can bring it in and just live-trace it. If you're familiar with Illustrator, it essentially does its best to turn it into a vector graphic.
00:07:26
Speaker
And I did that, removed all the colors and then kind of rebuilt it piece for piece in Illustrator. Now this is where it takes a little bit more technical skill, because Illustrator is a difficult tool if you haven't used it before. I'm zooming in now to kind of like show as I hover over the different little parts of the pine tree and the moon and the background and the different shade color bars that make up this like sunset effect going on here.
00:07:51
Speaker
that there's outlines around it because we're an illustrator and now I can manipulate all the little individual parts. This part takes a little bit more technical skill, but that's what it is.
Enhancing Complexity and Quality in Logo Design
00:08:00
Speaker
To be able to change a flat image into a fully vectorized, piece-by-piece image is not a talent skill, it's just a technical skill. I already know the technical parts of Illustrator, I know how to break it down into all these little components and how to wrap text around a circle and all that kind of stuff. Like, I knew that part.
00:08:18
Speaker
What I didn't know is how to make a pine tree, right? Because it's a logo design, but honestly, to this point, this is actually getting more into illustration, and I'm not an illustrator. I can't illustrate a vector forest and pine tree and stuff. That's actually hard. It takes some more skill than what I have.
00:08:36
Speaker
which is why I'm like, hey, not only was it faster to produce a bunch of different cool concepts like we were looking at before, not only was it so much easier to get to like five really cool concepts for the logo within the design range we were looking for,
00:08:52
Speaker
But this level of logo is something that I was not capable of before. I had to stick with much simpler logos or just go and buy a logo and then modify it afterwards.
AI's Impact on Creativity and Content Creation
00:09:00
Speaker
Now with AI, I was able to get to not only more faster, but to a higher quality logo than I had before.
00:09:08
Speaker
It's turned me in from a B- to an A- logo. And kind of to show like the last reveal here, I ended up taking it all and turning it into a little bit of a style guide. And I'm just picking fonts and matching it all with different things here. But you can see it's made a really nice visual aesthetic for them as a chiropractor.
00:09:28
Speaker
and it's just really cool. I took the rest of my design skills and now that AI is filled in some of the things I couldn't do and I filled it in with what I knew to do to make this a nice visual brand. So I'm really happy with where this is at. I really feel like AI is taking me to like a whole new level creatively. Like it's not just
00:09:49
Speaker
Um, it's AI is not here to steal creativity, but to enhance it. I feel like I can go into more creative directions now than I've ever been able to do on just a visual level. But of course, in my written level, on my content producing level, it's unlocking all kinds of ideas that I now have. I'm like, Oh, I can make cool social content or do a series that would have taken way, been way too expensive to produce before I can now do with like chat GPT and mid journey and Dolly much more quickly now.
00:10:16
Speaker
And if you know a little bit about the technical skills, even with just Canva or Photoshop, you can go so much farther, so much faster. So it is such an exciting time to be alive as a solopreneur, as a marketer, as...
00:10:32
Speaker
someone who has just has creative ideas, but didn't always have the technical expertise in order to execute many of them. So I hope you're watching this and are a little more inspired to go and play with these tools and take on creative challenges that maybe you would have shied away from before.
00:10:48
Speaker
As you master these tools, you'll start to notice your own capabilities expanding at a faster and greater rate, which is why I'm trying to bang the drum and tell everybody, hey, learn design because it'll extend what you're able to do, how fast you're able to go, and the quality of what you're able to do.